Sectarian Muslim violence marred the holiest day of the Shi’ite calendar on Thursday, with 25 people killed and more than 100 injured by bombings and clashes in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The violence erupted with a suspected suicide attack on Shi’ites in Hangu, northwestern Pakistan, as they celebrated Ashura, a mourning festival for the seventh-century death of the prophet Muhammad’s grandson.
Officials suspected militants linked to Sunni Muslims for the bloodshed, which came with Muslim sentiment around the world close to boiling point over cartoons of prophet Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper.
Local officials said 22 people — both minority Shi’ites and rival Sunnis — died in a suspected suicide bombing and subsequent rioting by enraged Shi’ite mobs, prompting the army to move into the town. More than 50 were injured.
In neighbouring Afghanistan at least three people were killed and 52 wounded later during clashes between the two sects in the western city of Herat, doctors said.
Around 500 troops were rushed to Herat but were unable to control the violence, said a defence ministry official. ”The situation is deteriorating,” he said.
The annual Ashura festival marks the death of Imam Hussein at Karbala in modern-day Iraq in 680AD. The festival is observed on the 10th day of the Muslim calendar’s first month of Muharram.
Many Shi’ites mark the ceremony by publicly wailing and by flagellating themselves with knives attached to chains.
Pakistan had massively beefed up security for the Ashura parades, which have often been targeted by Sunni extremists. During Ashura in 2001, 12 people died in fighting between Sunnis and Shi’ites.
Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said army and paramilitary forces had moved into Hangu to control the unrest after the attack ripped through Shi’ite devotees in the town’s main bazaar.
He said announcements had been made from local mosques urging calm, while security had been boosted across the country.
But Hangu’s mayor Ghaniur Rehman said the situation was still ”very bad” and witnesses reported continuing gunfire in the town, around 175km west of Islamabad.
”We have reports that some bodies are still lying in the streets and because of the violence and bad security situation they cannot be removed,” he said.
In contrast, the sectarian clash in Herat was first of its kind in Afghanistan for years, despite the country’s war-torn history and an ongoing insurgency by the ousted Taliban movement.
In Herat, two Shi’ite mosques were torched and several cars set ablaze, while shop windows were smashed as men hurled stones and beat each other with sticks, residents said.
The fighting appeared to have erupted after Shiites wrote slogans on cars belonging to Sunnis that praised Imam Hussein.
Afghanistan was already tense following days of protests against Western newspaper cartoons of Muhammad in which 11 demonstrators were killed, four of them on Wednesday.
Protests over the cartoons subsided throughout the Muslim world on Thursday but a Taliban commander warned that 100 militants have enlisted as suicide bombers because of the controversy.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi’ites, many beating their heads with knives, marked Ashura in Karbala amid a heavy security presence to prevent stampedes and insurgent attacks.
The ceremony has been marred in the past two years by rebel attacks that left dozens dead, but there were no reports of trouble on Thursday. – AFP
